Well, it is based on a number of assumptions. First is that the camera is (on average) in the center of the room when filming in that direction, but that is totally a guess as I have no idea where they planned on the ideal perspective view point to be.

Second is that what we see on those plans is in any way representational of the actual set piece. That piece was constructed long before the set plans I'm working with, so what shows up on the page may actually be little more than a representation of that piece while having absolutely no internal information about it.

But what I did find interesting was that the length pushed engineering far enough forward to match the only lit windows on the Enterprise secondary hull in the remastered Ultimate Computer (after the M-5 had shut off the lights on most of the other decks).

For me, I'm not committed to much beyond engineering being somewhere on that deck... if it is pressed up against the hanger deck wall or somewhere closer to the front of the secondary hull, at this point, I'm more interested in if it fits within the general space (which it does quite nicely).

Okay, great! Now, next question, are you planning on incorporating any TAS elements? specifically, I'm thinking of the version of engineering that had what looked like a early version of a warp core or vertical intermix chamber, if this room w/its vertical tube was attached overhead somehow to the loooong engies we see above, it would be near the front of the lower hull, then it might continue up (and below) to the impulse deck like the TMP design, and possibly allow a ressurection of my earlier heresy, that the 2cnd/3rd season engineering w/its dilithium crystal converter assembly would sit atop all this at the impulse deck? Of course, then the look of the 'short' impulse engines and the 'loooong' warp engines would have to be a cincidence, which will probably doom this theory?

Hmmmm... Ya know, I take back what I said about what might be behind the engine room grill. After watching a number of first season episodes last night I get the distinct impression that this was the intended size the viewer was supposed to assume. Engineering was mainly designed to help sell the overall size of the ship.

Further, when I drop in some of my estimates of where hull pressure compartments would be on the secondary hull, it turns out that there is a nice space for the large engine equipment to fit in on that deck. Could be coincidence, but it does work out nicely.

On the subject of TAS elements... most likely no. But then again, I'm not going to fill in every space on the ship. So anyone wanting to attempt to apply TAS elements to open areas not occupied by live actions sets should feel free.

April had two engine rooms in his plans, and I don't see any good reason to think that this couldn't be the case... there does seem to be room.

And it makes sense from what we've seen of Auxiliary Control (corridors and all) that Phaser Control room that's apparently nearby, they must be on the same deck. Is your bottom saucer deck big enough for both, plus the corridor?

And it makes sense from what we've seen of Auxiliary Control (corridors and all) that Phaser Control room that's apparently nearby, they must be on the same deck. Is your bottom saucer deck big enough for both, plus the corridor?

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According to I, Mudd auxiliary control is on deck 8, which is the same deck where I have forward phaser control located.

I don't have a set plan for that room yet, but I think we can safely say that it is smaller than two briefing rooms put together. In the image below I've drawn an outline of the usable area of deck 8, placed forward phaser control at the front, and three rooms made from joining two briefing rooms together, and added a length of corridor. And there is still the center of the deck that is open too.

And it makes sense from what we've seen of Auxiliary Control (corridors and all) that Phaser Control room that's apparently nearby, they must be on the same deck. Is your bottom saucer deck big enough for both, plus the corridor?

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My assumption has generally been that the phaser emitters themselves are movable within that ring. Might even be more than two (at least the capability is there, like if you have a ship with a more overtly military mission profile).

Hmmmm... Ya know, I take back what I said about what might be behind the engine room grill. After watching a number of first season episodes last night I get the distinct impression that this was the intended size the viewer was supposed to assume. Engineering was mainly designed to help sell the overall size of the ship.

Further, when I drop in some of my estimates of where hull pressure compartments would be on the secondary hull, it turns out that there is a nice space for the large engine equipment to fit in on that deck. Could be coincidence, but it does work out nicely.

On the subject of TAS elements... most likely no. But then again, I'm not going to fill in every space on the ship. So anyone wanting to attempt to apply TAS elements to open areas not occupied by live actions sets should feel free.

April had two engine rooms in his plans, and I don't see any good reason to think that this couldn't be the case... there does seem to be room.

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One of the factors that led me to putting the main engine room where I put it was the placement of the dilithium crystal articulation matrix chamber (that big doohickey in the middle of the room that showed up in the second season). That hummer in the middle of the room indicates to me that it's somewhere in between the warp core and the nacelles (the dueling references of whether or not the engine room was near the warp drive or the impulse engines further led me to decide that the big tube assembly wasn't a part of either system; rather, it's a power distribution system that sends energy to both systems, thus covering the apparent contradiction in references) and therefore, the big glowy tube thingy is forward, and the door is aft.

Putting the first season engine room forward was a) a way of dealing with the major differences in the contours of the room between the first and second seasons, and b) a joke that actually made a lot of sense the more I thought about it.

This is starting to look like, to me at least, that 947' is too small for the ship as portrayed on screen.

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Really?

I was getting the opposite impression. Just covering the basic elements seen (or implied) in TOS would seem to leave quite a lot of volume wide open.

Personally, I find cross sections to be quite deceiving. Most people assume when looking at this type of view that all of the key elements should be visible along the center line. Deck 8 has a large amount of volume unaccounted for beyond two relatively small rooms... and that is one of the smaller decks in the primary hull.

If this vessel were run by the US Navy, they would most likely double the number of people on board given the relative volume compared to ships or subs used today. Of course one would assume that with advances in technology that a crew that large wouldn't be needed in a couple hundred years.

But most of what we saw in TOS was in the primary hull... aside from the engineering decks and hanger deck, I haven't even started to consider what would fill a majority of the secondary hull.

It is most likely a lot easier for me to visualize this than explain it... compared to the type of stuff I was doing research on in school (immersions and embeddings of n-dimensional manifolds into R^m), this is quite tame. I was originally hoping that visualizing this type of stuff would replace some of my other visualization exercises (immersions of non-orientable 2-manifolds in R^3), but it hasn't worked out as I had hoped (though this is still more fun!).

As for the placement and utility of the engineering equipment seen on screen, I'm incline to completely dismiss all of the warp core type of stuff that popped up later on. What I see that equipment behind engineering being is a energy conversion system which supplies energy to the warp engines (which are totally within the nacelles), the deflector and phaser banks.

The fact that in The Paradise Syndrome Spock burned out that equipment using the deflector and phasers... which in turn took out the warp drive, would seem to support this. Direct "tubes" weren't needed for the phasers to burn out that equipment, so I can't see why direct "tubes" would be needed for the warp engines.

Additionally, when considering the history of high energy physics, the 1960s was a major time for particle accelerators (the Stanford Linear Accelerator was brought online at the same time that TOS was in development)... and I would guess that the equipment behind that screen in the engine room was meant to convey that type of high energy equipment (the type being used back then to create anti-matter).

But yeah, stuff that we see in later Treks... interesting, but not relevant. And as stated before, TOS technology is treated as black boxes. I have no intention of attempting to figure out why or how it worked as we live in the 21st century and not the 23rd, so we really don't know. Stuff people were putting forward 30 years ago is looking rather dated today, and I don't care to handicap my work on this by restricting it to guesses based on our understanding of technology today.

Two thoughts; first, like you (Shaw) I have files full of screen caps and the set blue prints like your using here and I havent found any plans for the auxiliary control either, the best I could do was to copy relevant pages from 'The Star Trek Sketch Book' which has some pics of MJ's miniature set that show the AC, and of course I drew up a set of floorplans based on these. Second, I reach where your coming from about ignoring most post TOS stuff, this is why, after years of theoriseing and weighing the pros and cons I've come to the conclusion that FJ's plans are still the best overall even if they do require some minor tweaking here and there to bring them into line with what we saw onscreen. Anyway, keep up the good work it's been great so far!

Have you reached a point where you have figured out where essential supplies (fuel, raw food materials for replicators, etc.) will be located?

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Boy, maybe I'm not making this clear enough... but no, I haven't. And no, I'm not going to.

How much fuel does a warp drive or impulse engine require? Neither exist, so how would we know? How efficiently can the essential (air, water, food, clothing, etc.) be reconstituted in the 23rd century? That is hundreds of years from now, so how would we know?

As I pointed out earlier in this thread, if you asked the average person of the 1930s about what would be needed to keep a submarine in the early 21st century supplied with enough fuel and air to stay submerged for more than a year, they would have been completely off base. They would be allotting space for diesel fuel for a year and air for a year because they hadn't heard of nuclear power or air scrubbers.

So again, no, I haven't set aside space for these things. And no, I'm not going to. But then again, I'm also not intending to fill every inch on the ship seeing as we didn't get to see every inch within the ship. I'm not going to create fictional equipment (that wasn't seen) to take up space, nor am I going to set aside space for resources when we don't understand what resources will be needed.

If submarines of today can reduce the space requirements for fuel and air by more than a factor of a hundred in a spin of less than 50 years, then I would guess that any estimates on space requirements for those things by us today could very well be off by at least that much when talking about a starship hundreds of years in the future with no understanding of the technology developed in the intervening years.

For all we know, all of those requirements may be solved within the same space as a standard refrigerator.

Still, other than fitting the interior spaces we saw into the interior space provided, the rest of that space is open to interpretation. When I'm done, anyone who wants to theorize about what may or may not fill the rest of that space should feel free to do so. My end point for this project will be far short of what most fans would consider complete plans of the Enterprise. At that point I fully intend to pass the baton onto you guys to figure out the rest to your hearts contentment.

TIN_MAN said:

I reach where your coming from about ignoring most post TOS stuff, this is why, after years of theoriseing and weighing the pros and cons I've come to the conclusion that FJ's plans are still the best overall even if they do require some minor tweaking here and there to bring them into line with what we saw onscreen. Anyway, keep up the good work it's been great so far!

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Yeah, I think that FJ was handicapped more by a lack of access to information than anything else. Today, we have nearly as much access to information as someone in the art department working on that show... more if you consider the fact that we can organize it for retrieval much better.

Plus we've watch the show for years... FJ wasn't even a fan of the show and got started doing much of this stuff just to make his daughter and friends happy.

Edit: I have been trying to get this point across using the term black box, but maybe this term isn't in common use outside of technical fields... so for the rest of my time working on this, I'll just say that the question of space for resources within the Enterprise is equivalent to asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

I always wondered why MJ had the main turbolift shaft that runs down the dorsal into the secondary hull offset, when the logical thing would be to have run straight down as in FJ's version? He obviously wanted it like that since he has it that way on his phase II plans. My guess is he was making room for some sort of sensor/delector machinary that he envisioned as being there, obstructing the shaft in that area?

Seriously... if you want to look at this sort of thing AT ALL... I'd suggest setting up lots and lots of cargo spaces, which later (with the advent of early replicator technology) got converted to lab space and crew quarters and so forth, turning the ship from a 200-person military-type heavy cruiser to a 430-person multimission exploratory cruiser.

This is starting to look like, to me at least, that 947' is too small for the ship as portrayed on screen.

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Really?

I was getting the opposite impression. Just covering the basic elements seen (or implied) in TOS would seem to leave quite a lot of volume wide open.

Personally, I find cross sections to be quite deceiving. Most people assume when looking at this type of view that all of the key elements should be visible along the center line. Deck 8 has a large amount of volume unaccounted for beyond two relatively small rooms... and that is one of the smaller decks in the primary hull.

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I think it's the fact that you only have eight decks in the saucer....

As for the placement and utility of the engineering equipment seen on screen, I'm incline to completely dismiss all of the warp core type of stuff that popped up later on. What I see that equipment behind engineering being is a energy conversion system which supplies energy to the warp engines (which are totally within the nacelles), the deflector and phaser banks.

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The TNG warp core approach has its basis in TOS. "That Which Survives", to be precise. That's where we get the term "Matter/Antimatter Reaction Chamber" which features so prominently in the TNG Tech Manual.

The fact that in The Paradise Syndrome Spock burned out that equipment using the deflector and phasers... which in turn took out the warp drive, would seem to support this. Direct "tubes" weren't needed for the phasers to burn out that equipment, so I can't see why direct "tubes" would be needed for the warp engines.

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Perzactly!

Additionally, when considering the history of high energy physics, the 1960s was a major time for particle accelerators (the Stanford Linear Accelerator was brought online at the same time that TOS was in development)... and I would guess that the equipment behind that screen in the engine room was meant to convey that type of high energy equipment (the type being used back then to create anti-matter).

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Besides, Jefferies knew the nacelle struts went up, not down, so if those were supposed to run up to the nacelles, he'd have set up those tubes that way.